I’ve had a fun idea for regular short pieces in Mind Engine. Two to eight pages probably.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to approach doing political comics that are in fact a little didactic. A few other pieces/thoughts have been falling into place…
Just now the name The Left Pages popped into my head followed by the notion of having the comics narrative art only on the left, even side pages of each spread, the verso.
And filling the right, odd side pages with illustrative art or an assortment of sketches. Not necessarily connected but in some cases.
And then that made me think Verso is also a good title for the series. Even Recto Verso? Maybe even better… but then, I like the blut fist notio too and it has no known uses so I call dibs!
This tickles a good bit of brain.
And yeah I have scripts. They are often starting as longer notes in leftist groups right now, or unposted thoughts about them as they percolate out of own 50ish years thinking about it.
I’ve always liked to try to get some political subtext into my work but primarily sought to do it as part of a story and not in your face so blatantly.
Mostly just cuz at first I really didn’t have any skills as a writer, and then once I’d worked on that I really appreciate consuming material that informs me on a political level through excellent storytelling.
The work I’ve done the last two decades has been more in that spirit. I was just talking about this to a couple people about this since friday. That it’s hard to do well and still have it visible to the reader in a useful way.
I’ve done some that maybe managed that but it’s really hard to feel like you can get even half of the ideas you have if you think about it the way I do, into anything that way. I’m still working on it but it’s frustrating and there’s no guarantee people will come away with the impressions you wanted.
Circling that problem the last couple years I keep coming back to some form of explainers of concepts as I understand them, which also means in some cases my versions or takes on things.
It’ll mean revisiting a lot of theory, in some cases stuff that I only know on a superficial level. And looking at a lot of Praxis which I think is equally if not more important from the perspective of my own leftist roots.
And I know some people are actively doing this and have been most of their lives so I’ll probably reach out to them at some point to pick their brains, discuss ideas and maybe come up with premises for some of my stories?
Likely will work in mostly a quick sketch drawing mode for the art with an effort put into making the text poetic and engaging. But also, very explicitly this is what I see and here’s my theories or ideas about what to do.
Some will just express my support for things being done and explain ideas I think get distorted and propagandized falsely. But also I feel like i’m enough of an oddball, that my lane isn’t really fully defined. So i’ll be framing some of my own proposals too.
I really like my looser sketch stuff for all the things I’m doing in the nonfiction vein so that’s probably the esthetic for it.
More to come…